All the time we were told that Palin was stupid, and it turns out that the problem may have been that she’s too good looking, which only leads people to believe she’s stupid:

The Alaska governorÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s attractiveness may indeed have affected the race Ã¢â‚¬â€œ by making voters less likely to support the GOP ticket.

In a paper just published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, psychologists Nathan Heflick and Jamie Goldenberg of the University of South Florida describe an experiment they conducted shortly after Wilkinson wrote those words. Building upon 1980s research suggesting attractive women in high-status jobs are perceived as less competent (a finding that has been challenged in recent years), they examined whether PalinÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s sex appeal Ã¢â‚¬â€œ the subject of endless media chatter in the weeks after she joined the ticket Ã¢â‚¬â€œ hindered her ability to make the case she was up for the job.

You can’t help but appreciate the title of the “study” in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology: Objectifying Sarah Palin: Evidence that Objectification Causes Women to be Perceived as Less Competent and Less Fully Human

A shorter title would have been, “People Think Good Looking Republican Women are Stuck-Up Dipshits.”

Either way, the title sounds better than, “Payback for All the Girls Who Didn’t Go Out With Me in High School.”

In fairness to the people who did the study, they were going to conduct a similar experiment concerning the perception of good looking female liberal politicians, but they couldn’t find any.